The electric light orchestrators struggle to be the first to bring America out of the darkness in The Current War, which stars Benedict Cumberbatch and Michael Shannon as Thomas Edison and George Westinghouse. Here is the first trailer for the film from Alfonso Gomez‐Rejon, his follow-up to the 2015 Sundance hit Me and Earl and the Dying Girl.

It’s 1879. The flamboyant Edison and his team have done the first successful light bulb tests, leading to “the end of night” amid the Industrial Age. But the broad distribution of electricity isn’t as simple as Scholastic Rock would make it seem a century later. While Edison was convinced that his direct current was the wave of the future, his less showy but similarly brilliant rival Westinghouse isn’t buying Edison’s medicine and flips the switch with a different approach. He gets help from Nikola Tesla (Nicholas Hoult), the eccentric and enigmatic “man out of time,” and together they bet it all on the risky and dangerous alternating current. Tom Holland, Katherine Waterston and Tuppence Middleton co-star.